Puzzles
by Moonglow gal
Summary: An innocent conversation about puzzles takes an unexpected turn and leads Inuyasha to explain exactly what the hell is going on under those two fuzzy ears. But will Kagome like his explanation? One shot.


**Puzzles**

_Hello, minna-san! Yes, look at me, my first one-shot in, like, forever! Katherine, if you're reading this, I'm sorry that_ That Dirty Old Man _is being left behind, but I really liked this idea, so...so_ there_! Anyway, I'm not sure how long I've had this idea in my head, but I had to get it out before it rotted, so here it is! Japanese word of the day is:_ fuketsudan_, indecision._

_Disclaimer: I spend too much of my time on fanfiction (either writing or dreaming up ideas) to own Inuyasha._

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"Kagome, how much time do you guys have to _waste_ in this era anyway?" Inuyasha complained, watching the girl he had addressed as she examined the puzzle piece in her hand.

She stuck her tongue out at him, at the same time grabbing the cover of the puzzle box. "I am not _wasting time_, Inuyasha. I am taking a _break_." She frowned at the bit of cardboard she held, then at the picture, than back at the puzzle piece. "I think…" She set down the lid and frowned down at the puzzle. It would eventually become a picture of a medieval European knight fighting a Western-style dragon, the warrior valiantly brandishing his sword and keeping a firm rein on his hostile white steed, the serpent breathing smoke and sprouting tiny bolts of lightning across its scales the same color of old blood. But now, she had only the border and the knight finished. She sighed as she tapped part of his saddle into place. How long would this take?

She felt her companion's eyes boring into her from his position on her pink-covered bed. Suddenly, with a soft rustle of cloth, he was crouching on the floor on the other side of the puzzle. The baggy red sleeves of his haori draped over the border pieces that would become the tips of the dragon's wings as his silver hair fell over his shoulders and obscured the space that would be occupied by the dragon's body. "Kagome…" His face bent to the side. She turned to see what he was looking at and saw the puzzle she just finished the last time she came home, a picture of a magnificent Shinto shrine, surrounded by a mystical forest and gray-lavender mist. "Kagome, these two puzzles are the same."

"Hm?" She looked back to the battle scene then to the vision of peace and mystery. "What are you talking about? They're so different."

"No, not the pictures." His golden eyes flipped up to look meaningfully at her, momentarily reflecting her own gray eyes and black hair, before dropping back to the incomplete puzzle. "You see, the pieces are all the same shapes." Ignoring her small noise of protest, he removed a piece from the puzzle she currently working on and the corresponding piece from the finished one. "Look!" He held one behind the other and turned them, showing that they indeed were the same. "Why is that?"

She smiled ruefully. "Probably because these are really cheap puzzles, Inuyasha. That means we don't pay a lot of money for them, so the people who make them don't use as much effort on them. They probably have a certain pattern for every size of puzzle they put out so they don't have to make original cuts for each one."

He nodded slowly. She had already spent a lot of time explaining to him how the makers took a picture, pasted the thin paper it was printed on onto cardboard, then cut the cardboard into interlocking pieces. Explaining the process of packaging the puzzles, sending them to stores, and selling them had been a nightmare, for they had led to a torrent of surprisingly insightful questions about the workings of the economy. When Inuyasha had moved on to asking how it was possible to make so many different puzzles (he hadn't quite grasped the idea that multiple copies of each picture could be made), she had cut the conversation short by abruptly going to bed. Unfortunately for her, when she had settled herself down the next day to spend another ten minutes or so on the temple scene, he had picked up their thread of conversation as if she had never grown so selectively deaf to him the day before. "I think I get it…but Kagome, what's the fun in that if they're all the same?"

"But they aren't, Inuyasha. When we put them together, we mainly use the pictures, not the shapes. I don't know, maybe because you guys don't have puzzles, you aren't used to putting together a fragmented image this way, but that's how you're supposed to do it. It's fun!" Kagome turned to the box of pieces and selected a brilliantly white piece that seemed to have a bit of the horse's bridle on it.

"Fun? Looks kind of boring to me." His white dog ears flicked decisively on top of his head, as if the action could strengthen his stand.

No, that wasn't the bridle, it was part of the stirrup. "It's like being able to solve a problem that you've been trying to solve for a long time. With every piece, you get this feeling of satisfaction that you're that much closer. And it gets you thinking about things."

"Puzzles? Thinking? How the hell d'they do that?" he asked lazily, shifting so that he was sitting cross-legged on the floor, no longer absorbed by the puzzle, but rather by his companion.

"Well, here's one thing I thought up a few months ago. Just imagine that a puzzle…is the whole world, or maybe just 'your' world, the small slice of the whole world that you experience. Every person is like one piece, lending something to that world. Take even one away…" She reached over and, without looking, removed a piece that sat smack in the middle of the steps leading to the shrine. "Take one away and you leave a hole. It can never really be healed, because each piece is unique and serves a special purpose. Even if you try to replace that piece…" Saying this, Kagome removed the corresponding piece in the dragon puzzle and placed it in the middle of the shrine steps. "It won't work." Now, the tip of the knight's sword flashed in the otherwise peaceful scene. She restored the pieces to their proper places as she said, "You see, Inuyasha? The puzzle isn't just like the world. It's also like the human heart."

The boy across from her flinched slightly. "_Just_ the human heart?"

Kagome sighed apologetically. "Of course not _just_ the human heart. You know I would never imply that you as a half-demon are any different from me in ways that really matter."

His shoulders lost their tense, hurt set, but he scowled at her and asked half-seriously, "Whaddya mean, 'in ways that really matter'? I'm a helluva lot stronger than you, and don't say _that_ doesn't matter, 'cause it's saved your skin more than once."

She had to smile at that. "Oh, you needn't thank me so generously for caring about your feelings, Inuyasha. Really, you can stop the kowtowing now."

"I'm not—feh." He flicked his head away with a dignified snort.

She giggled as the horse, prancing and snorting bravely at the currently non-existent dragon, slowly took shape under her patient hands. "Also…" she murmured thoughtfully. "These two puzzles in particular remind me of…of us, in a weird sort of way."

"Us? Us, as in you and me?"

"No, more like our worlds. Your world, the Feudal Era, mysterious, magical, frightening, beautiful, like the temple." She set down the lid of the puzzle box and sat up, staring straight at the half-demon. "My world, active, frightening in its own way, full of conflict, pride, confidence, like the battle scene. It's an interesting thing to think about." She moved so that she mirrored her friend, sitting cross-legged, although she grasped her feet and rocked slightly, while his arms were folded against his stiffly upright torso.

Inuyasha's eyebrow lifted at that observation. He looked down at the two puzzles for a minute, considering her words, before looking back up at her. "I don't think so."

Stung, Kagome said snippily back, "Well, I do."

"Well, I don't," he insisted. "Kagome, your era, your world, is an era of peace. You always tell me that it's safer here than it is back in the Feudal Era. A lot of strange things happen here, with only your 'eckeltricity' and 'new-cu-ler' power to explain it. Your time is strange, but it's safe. This place is more like the temple, not the…battle thing. The _Feudal_ Era is the one that's more dangerous. Demons, warriors, stupid human wars based on honor and other damn stupid things. You got them backward, Kagome."

She rocked backward, secretly impressed. "But Inuyasha, your world is a real mystery to me. There's a lot about it that I don't know or understand."

"And that puzzle isn't finished yet, is it?" he questioned, unusually reasonable. "Until it's done, you can't know everything about it."

"But your era _is_ done. We're in my time right now, which means the Feudal Era's ended." The girl nodded at the completed temple, shocked that Inuyasha was capable of philosophical debates like this.

Inuyasha puffed a stray hair out of his face before he replied, "But you know all about your own world. You _don't_ know the Feudal Era yet. It isn't whole for you yet. There are still holes in it for you." When Kagome didn't respond, he apparently took that as a sign of victory, for he leaned back against her pink bed and smirked.

The smirk wavered when she smiled back at him. "That _is_ interesting. We're arguing totally opposite points, but I think we're both right." At this, his face darkened with the prospect of losing his triumph. "Both puzzles are both eras. Mystery, danger, fear, human idiocy…they're in both."

The two fell silent, chewing over their mutual victory, before Kagome burst out, "Hey, that really works! Inuyasha, look!" She tapped the puzzles excitedly. "You see, the pieces are the same! The _people_ are the same! The same nature, the same problems, the same mistakes, the same minds, the same hearts! The people don't change!"

His ears had flicked up at her outburst and, although his face remained bored and somewhat peeved, those traitor ears of his were focusing intently on her. "So," he added impassively, "their souls don't change. It's like reincarnation. They're still the same."

The friendly atmosphere in the room suddenly froze as both realized what he had said. "Souls", "reincarnation", "the same": they were words that had haunted Kagome ever since the day when she had discovered that she was the reincarnation of Kikyo, the other half of Inuyasha's tragic story of love lost fifty years before he had met his companion from the future. With the aid of her reincarnated soul, Kikyo had been returned to some semblance of life in a body of clay, bones, and stolen souls, and had returned to prey on the man she had once loved.

In the course of their time together, all hope of regaining the trust Inuyasha and Kikyo had shared disappeared, but their feelings, unfortunately for their peace of mind, did not. Those feelings had wormed their way into Kagome's heart the same way Inuyasha himself had, attacking the vulnerable love that had grown for the caustic ruffian with dog ears and freakishly golden eyes. He, she knew, returned her love in his own way. He had sworn mere days after they had met to protect her. He had opened up to her about secrets he had never revealed before. He had even accepted a kiss from her, although they both had been too embarrassed to talk about it ever since.

But Kagome always doubted his devotion to her. She always thought in the back of her head, despite his reassurances, that he was trying to make her into some replacement for Kikyo. They, after all, shared souls. She, the copy, looked very much like her previous incarnation, and some unwittingly insensitive people had said before that perhaps she and Kikyo were one and the same. And Inuyasha knew that, which was why the silence in the room had grown so heavy.

Her gray eyes fixed unsurely on his face, asking, without her knowledge, some question that she didn't even know how to express. His thought process was almost visible through those two golden mirrors: _shitshitshitshitdamnstupidmouthshitshitshitshit, _etc. The thought, normally amusing, only hurt her more. Was he thinking that because he had hurt her? Because he had let his true feelings show? Because he was thinking that he had somehow betrayed Kikyo? The questions pressed insistently against her lips, clamped tightly shut to keep them from quivering.

Finally, he broke the silence, rushing in exactly as he would rush into battle, pelting at his target, wildly swinging his sword, not stopping to think whether his course of actions was the wisest. "Hang on, Kagome, you've got me wrong—"

"I'm sure I do," she said softly, truly intending to sound sincere. "But Inuyasha, it doesn't matter what you meant, what matters is what I heard."

He unfolded his legs and somehow managed the coordination to move smoothly into a kneeling position as he leaned toward her, one cautious hand outstretched. "Oh, for—"

"I'm serious, Inuyasha. What I heard is that souls stay the same from era to era. People don't change. Reincarnations are the same as their previous incarnations. What I heard is that I am Kikyo. Can you blame me for that?"

"How many times do I have to tell you," he snapped, immediately firing up, as he always did when confronted, "that you _aren't_ Kikyo? So what if you share a soul? You are totally different people, Kagome!"

"How thick can you be, " Kagome retorted, "to think that I don't know that? How thick can you be to not think that I still have my doubts? Inuyasha, you _loved_ Kikyo so much, and I know you still do, so how can you expect me to not be unsure of how you feel about me?"

His golden eyes narrowed defensively. "Are you calling me a liar?"

"No!" she shouted in frustration. Both of them, startled by the volume of her exclamation, glanced at the closed door of her room, the only barrier between them and her family's prying ears. Kagome turned back to him and said, with more consideration for their privacy but withoutany morepatience, "Inuyasha, I believe you, but how can I know that you fully understand your feelings?"

"You believe me? Then can't you trust me to know that I care about you as Kagome, _not_ as Kikyo or her replacement?" he fumed at her, equally careful to keep the conversation as quiet as possible, although he seemed to have less success.

In response, Kagome swung herself around, untangling her legs and bending them at the knees until she faced the wall, hugging her legs and resting her chin on her arms. "You care about me?"

"Of course I care about you, stupid! Why else would I bother protecting you the way I do? Why else would I drag myself to this disgustingly smelly era to come bring you back home?" He sprang over the puzzles and landed softly before her. "Even _you_ aren't stupid enough to not realize that you _are_ important to me."

She glared defiantly at him. "_How_ am I important to you? What _am_ I to you, Inuyasha? What is _Kikyo_ to you? How am I different, if you really _do_ think I'm different?"

"You should know that!" he barked at her, settling back onto the floor, his legs also bent but spread far apart, his elbows resting on his knees and his hands falling loosely between them.

"I wouldn't be asking if I knew, jerk," Kagome muttered back.

He tossed his head and looked away. "As if I need to answer a question as obvious as that."

"_Just answer_," she ordered through gritted teeth.

His eyes and ears both flicked at her before consciously flipping away again. The half-demon snorted as he shifted uncomfortably, but otherwise remained silent. Kagome also said nothing, willing to wait the stubborn boy out.

Several obstinate minutes passed this way, the air between the two belligerent companions tensing with every second. Suddenly, Inuyasha gave in. At first not saying a word, he leaned over the dragon puzzle and pulled out a piece. "Look. This is me."

Kagome raised an eyebrow at him, refusing to respond otherwise. Mistaking the insistence that he get everything said fast for skepticism, he growled, "You know what, you yourself said that the pieces are like people, so don't go giving me weird looks." Obediently, the eyebrow came back down, but her stare remained intense. "So…so this is me," he muttered, now self-conscious. He leaned over and took the corresponding piece from the temple puzzle. "And this is Kikyo." He held them up side by side, his piece showing a chunk of the knight's flashing sword, Kikyo's, a shred of fog obscuring the shrine entrance.

Both stared at the two objects for a moment, Inuyasha collecting his thoughts, Kagome thinking irrationally that it was only natural that he'd start with Kikyo, not her. "We're the same. That's why I fell in love with her. We both needed to be strong. We hated weakness…we couldn't _afford_ weakness. We both just wanted to be free. We wanted to be released from expectations and assumptions. We wanted companionship. So we kind of were attracted to each other from the beginning, just because both of us wanted to be understood. And later, when we grew to see how alike we were…well, I don't know about Kikyo, but I felt like only she really knew me. I could only trust the person who understood my situation, who _shared_ my situation. Get it?"

Kagome nodded reluctantly, knowing that he would give up in disgust if she didn't egg him on somehow. Next, he selected a piece that lay next to Kikyo's, this one showing the slightly ajar door of the shrine. He set down Kikyo's piece, granting Kagome an unreasonable sense of victory. Now, carefully minding the claws that bristled on each fingertip, he fitted together his and her pieces. "You and me," he said bluntly. "You complete me, Kagome. I protect you, you give me a reason to protect. I complain, you listen. I shout, you shout back. I feel bad, you comfort me. You may not have experienced what I have, and you probably will never understand it all, but you still feel open sympathy for me. I act stupid, and you forgive me. I run off, you catch me. You depend on me, I depend on you."

He let the two pieces dangle from one hand in the space between his knees as he sighed. "That's how you're different, Kagome. Kikyo was my reflection, and you…you're my missing piece. That's why you and Kikyo are completely different, at least to me, because you mean entirely different things to me."

She stared at him for one long moment, at once touched and angry. "So is that it? Because of that you won't let either one of us go? You'll just let us keep dangling until you've taken your own sweet time to decide what's best for _you_? Don't get me wrong, Inuyasha, I want you to be happy, but I'm not going to wait forever."

He gently snapped the two pieces apart, then placed his on the floor and held Kikyo's piece next to Kagome's instead. "Kagome, Kikyo is _like_ me, and you _complete_ me. But we aren't from the same puzzle. We aren't from the same world. Kikyo is dead. She shouldn't be alive anymore, and she would be better off resting peacefully in the afterlife instead of wandering around as the living dead. You are from a different time. You don't belong in my world, I don't belong in yours. I admit, I'm not sure what I need more now, shared understanding or unconditional empathy. I don't know if I should go with Kikyo to the world where she _does_ belong or if I should keep you in a world where you _don't_. Can you understand that?"

Kikyo's and Kagome's pieces were rejoined and returned to the temple puzzle, and Inuyasha's was restored to the knight. Kagome studied the three pieces silently, knowing that the half-demon was watching her pensively, hopeful, embarrassed, and irritated all at once. She, in fact, felt the same way. Finally, she shoved the shame aside and answered, "No, I don't understand…but I think I can accept it. For now."

Inuyasha snorted. "Good, 'cause you'd have to even if you didn't want to." That said, he reached into the pile of homeless puzzle pieces and pulled one out. He studied it for a moment, glanced at the lid of the box, then leaned forward and confidently placed it at the top of the horse's neck. When his hand moved away, one wild, brave brown eye rolled up Kagome as the knight's steed prepared to carry his master into battle. "Kagome…I didn't mean what I said before, about souls not changing, because they really do. People change. Eras change. Even feelings change."

At that, Kagome's head snapped up to look squarely at him, gray challenging gold before gold turned away. "Yeah, with time, feelings change. Kikyo and I can't trust each other anymore, but now I trust you and all of our other friends. I know if I wait too long, our feelings…for each other, I guess, could change. Maybe you'll get sick of me…if you aren't already. Maybe I'll stop thinking about everything that happened with Kikyo, or maybe I'll decide that I really don't need you as much as I think I do now. Anything can happen with time, Kagome."

She stared persistently at the side of his head, letting her knees fall the ground and turn her to face him. Her hands braced themselves against the ground as she tried to understand exactly what it was he was trying to say.

Suddenly, his clawed hand reached out and gripped one of her wrists, although his face remained focused on the foolhardy knight. "But I'm not going to wait that long, Kagome. It will take time for me to decide what is best for me and for all of us. But I won't wait until we've all decided that it doesn't matter anymore. When I decide, someone will be hurt, but I hope she'll also be happy that the other two are happy. I'm not going to wait so long that none of us even care anymore. It wouldn't be fair."

Finally, he looked back at her, looked straight into her eyes with a solemnity that unnerved her. "I promise, Kagome, I won't make you wait forever. I wish I could promise more than that, but give me just a little longer. Stay with me a little longer until I decide. I swear, you won't have to wait forever."

_(end)_

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_Woot, most of this just poured out in one sitting (although this is_ really _short)! I am very proud of myself! I actually like this one-shot (well, I like it now, but just wait a few months when I come back to it: "What kind of shit was I writing?")_

_Anyway, sorry it got kind of philosophical, but I was thinking right alongside Kagome and trying to steer the conversation to the main point for most of the time, so it ended up getting unusually thoughtful for Inuyasha. Ah well, a little thinking won't give him a coronary._

_Finally, I have three more chapter fic ideas! How pathetic am I? _

_Whatever. Until next time!_


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